Mistakes are an integral part of any person's life. Without mistakes, we don't know how to really live. Right versus wrong, other than the obvious of “don't kill people” or “don't steal”, is learned mainly through trial and error. Everyone learns things differently and sometimes the mistakes you make don't necessarily have to be extreme, but mistakes are made none-the-less. Your late teens and early twenties are the biggest times for mistakes and self realization.
I knew at a young age I liked writing. I wrote in journals and wrote silly short stories (most notably in my mind, an extremely morbid story about a stalker in the early 1900's when I was in seventh grade). When I was little, and many times after that, my grandfather told me to write what I knew. He meant that I shouldn't try to write something I couldn't be honest about, as in writing about a man and his life in Iraq or something. Unfortunately, I was quite young and had a very strange thought process (seriously, I thought Santa couldn't exist because my mom knew how to spell his name) so I took it to mean that I had to experience as much as possible in order to write. I guess that's not so terrible, but when Hunter S. Thompson became one of my heroes in late high school, I decided to throw caution to the wind and start immersing myself like an anthropologist into any and every subculture I knew existed in my school and tried to understand the inter workings of every person's mind in these groups. That, mixed with my own young mind and its developments, lead me to getting in quite a few mishaps and shenanigans.
Let me preempt this with a warning: this is not a self help book. I don't believe in them. Yes, advice is nice, but in the end, you need to figure this shit out on your own. This is merely an account of my mistakes and my just throwing it out there that no mistake (other than the aforementioned killing someone or something just as bad) is really the end of the world. You're going to screw up. You're going to hurt people's feelings. You're going to get fired. You may even spend a night in jail. Still, you will survive and hopefully look back on things with a smile and know you learned from everything and not look back regretfully.
